Region · Arcane City-State
Pestraval
Built in the wound left by the War of Dragons. Where the Sundershock Crater ended one age, Pestraval began another: a city of permits, archives, and research that technically passed ethics review. Power here is filed, not wielded. Scroll to explore its districts.
The Sundershock Crater
The Sundershock struck during the fifth year of the War of Dragons and ended it within the season. What it struck is still not entirely agreed upon. The crater floor is viridian glass fused from three strata of earth, the remains of two armies, and whatever was underneath both. The glass sings when it rains. Nobody has published a satisfactory explanation. Several researchers have published unsatisfactory ones.
Thermal vents along the crater wall generate the Whisper Winds: spiralling updrafts that carry faint voices, identifiable words, and occasionally complete sentences in languages the speaker cannot account for. The Arcanetier Vaults maintain a listening post on the eastern rim. The log is classified at Permit Level Four and its length is not disclosed. Visitors report the winds feel like being remembered by something large.
The mid-crater ruins fused rather than collapsed: walls standing at angles that suggest they were mid-motion when the Sundershock struck. Scavengers licensed by the Vaults excavate the outer strata under supervision. Unlicensed excavation is categorised as a Permit Level Six violation, which carries the same penalty as assault on an archivist. The black glass extracted from the lower strata sings when wet and commands a significant price in the Rim markets.
Pestraval officially observes the Sundershock Anniversary with silence, permit-review ceremonies, and the opening of one additional level of the Vaults archive for public access. The protocols were established by the Concord Archive in the Accord’s founding period. Unofficially, the anniversary is when the Whisper Winds are loudest and when the glass glows without the help of rain. The protocols do not address this. The Archive is aware.
“The Sundershock did not end the war. It changed what winning meant. We have been renegotiating that definition ever since.”Concord Archive, Founding Charter preamble
The Arcanetier Vaults
The Vaults do not forbid dangerous knowledge. They file it. The distinction is the founding principle of Pestraval’s entire regulatory philosophy: magic that is documented, cross-referenced, and properly permitted is considered safer than magic that has been driven underground by prohibition. The Vaults contain twenty-three categories of knowledge that would be illegal elsewhere in the Accord. Each has its own permit tier. Each permit tier has a queue.
Ward-wrights maintain the Vaults’ containment infrastructure: wards that are renewed on a rotating schedule, suppression fields that require calibration after any significant magical event, and the seventeen blast doors that are never all open simultaneously. Ward-wrights are the most overworked and least celebrated professionals in Pestraval. They are also, by statute, the only people with unrestricted access to any Vault level at any time. Three have used this access in ways that required new containment protocols.
Kraive has administered the Vaults for sixteen years and is personally responsible for the Permit Level Seven classification that covers approximately three quarters of the pre-Accord relic collection. She believes that classification is both necessary and insufficient. She has said this in public twice. Both times, the subsequent permit review found her position correct. She is not reassured by this. Visitors seeking audience are advised that her first question is always about their containment methodology.
A Permit Level One access card allows entry to the public archive and the memorial floor. A Permit Level Seven requires sponsorship by two sitting Arcanetiers, a written methodology review, and demonstration of containment capability. Levels two through six exist on a spectrum between these that takes approximately three months to navigate for a straightforward application. Researchers regularly arrive in Pestraval with Levels One through Four already in hand, acquired remotely through the Vaults’ correspondence office, which has a six-week backlog.
“The permit is not a barrier to knowledge. It is evidence that you understand what you are asking for.”Arcanetier Vaults, Entry Hall inscription
The Concord Archive
The Concord Archive is where the Accord is maintained rather than where it is celebrated. Elven archivists work in long-term rotations: their natural lifespan allows continuity of institutional memory that no human administration can match, which the Archive considers an asset and certain Accord signatories consider a negotiating disadvantage they have not yet found a solution to. The Archive’s sub-basement holds the original Accord documents. The sub-basement is also, separately, a blast shelter. Nobody asks whether this is a coincidence.
Every third Tenday, the Archive opens its lower reading rooms to gnome scribes working on the reconciliation project: matching pre-Accord records to post-Accord territorial designations to identify properties, debts, and legal statuses left unresolved by the peace settlement. The project has been running for forty-two years. Current estimates suggest completion in another thirty. The gnome lead archivist, who has personally worked on the project for twenty-eight years, describes this timeline as optimistic.
The Accord’s dual-heritage registration system created an administrative category that did not previously exist and has required continuous interpretation since. Half-elf registry mediators are the Archive’s specialist staff for cases where a person’s legal status, inheritance rights, or territorial access is contested under Accord law. The caseload has not decreased in forty years. The Archive maintains this is not an indictment of the system. Mediators maintain that their caseload speaks for itself.
Vor is the Archive’s human face and its primary point of contact for Accord member states. She has served fourteen years in a role that typically turns over every eight, which the Archive attributes to her unusual capacity for institutional patience. Vor attributes it to having accepted that her job is to answer questions correctly and then answer them again when the same delegation returns with the same question reframed as a new one. She has answered the same nine questions in several hundred configurations.
“The Accord ended the War of Dragons. The Archive is where we keep finding out what that means.”Archive Warden Thessaly Vor, orientation address
The Collegia
Pestraval’s Collegia houses eleven research institutions with overlapping specialities and carefully negotiated jurisdictional boundaries. Each institution has its own permit structure for students, visiting researchers, and what it diplomatically calls “observational access.” The Harmonics Institute is the largest and the most frequently cited in the Vaults’ incident log. The Institute maintains that correlation is not causation. The Vaults maintain a separate file of incidents in which it very clearly is.
Gnome troubleshooters are the Collegia’s first-response professionals for experimental irregularities. They operate under a charter that explicitly does not require them to explain how they solved the problem, only to confirm that it has been solved and is unlikely to recur. The “unlikely to recur” standard has been tested on several occasions. The troubleshooters’ rate of repeat incidents is fourteen percent, which the Collegia considers excellent given the nature of the work.
The Institute studies Harmonics magic under Permit Level Three to Five authorisations, depending on amplitude. The Ten Laws of Harmancy are printed on the wall of every laboratory, and every researcher signs an annual acknowledgement that they have read, understood, and intend to comply with all ten. Compliance incidents are reviewed quarterly. The most common violation is Law Seven, which concerns resonance stacking. The second most common is Law Three, which the Institute considers more embarrassing to admit.
The Collegia’s oldest buildings were constructed before modern ward standards and are not fully compatible with current suppression infrastructure. Renovation is ongoing, scheduled for completion in seven years, and has been scheduled for completion in approximately seven years for the past eleven years. Half-orcs are disproportionately represented in the Collegia’s maintenance and emergency-response staff. The standard characterisation is that they respond well to the words “sir, the corridor is screaming again.” This characterisation is accurate and they find it only mildly annoying.
“The corridor was screaming. We addressed the corridor. The corridor is no longer screaming. Please indicate whether you require the full incident report or a summary.”Gnome troubleshooter incident summary, ref. C-441
The Annexes
The Annexes exist because some research cannot be conducted in the Collegia without risk to adjacent institutions, and cannot be conducted in the Vaults without triggering containment protocols that take six weeks to reset. They are, in the Arcanetier Vaults’ formal designation, “transitional research environments.” In practice, they are where experiments go when they have been approved but nobody wants them nearby. The Annex waiting list has never been empty in living memory.
Every Annex research programme files a Safety Rubric: a document outlining predicted risk categories, containment measures, acceptable incident thresholds, and the specific conditions under which the lead researcher agrees to stop. Rubric compliance is audited monthly. The audit team is staffed by ward-wrights on secondment from the Vaults, which gives them audit authority they visibly enjoy. Three Annexes have had their Rubrics suspended pending review in the past two years. All three are currently operating under provisional reinstatement.
The Annexes host a category of research that the Vaults’ classification system describes as “ethics-adjacent”: projects that passed the ethics review process, sometimes narrowly, and are technically authorised under existing permit structures. The ethics committee reviews all ongoing ethics-adjacent programmes annually. The committee’s chair has described this as “a reliable source of professional development.” Two programmes have been reclassified from ethics-adjacent to ethics-compliant in the past decade. One has moved in the other direction.
Annex supervisors are appointed by the Vaults and serve two-year rotations. The rotation policy was introduced after it was observed that supervisors who remained longer began to advocate for their assigned programmes rather than auditing them. Current supervisors are Arcanetier Mave Tundrel (Annexes One through Three) and Ward-Wright Senior Ossin Halke (Annexes Four through Six). Halke is on his third rotation, which is two more than policy recommends. He has declined to explain why the Vaults have not enforced rotation in his case. The Vaults have also declined to explain this.
“The research technically passed ethics review. We are reviewing what ‘technically’ means in this context.”Arcanetier Ethics Committee, internal correspondence
The Rim
The Rim follows the crater’s edge and is the part of Pestraval that does not require a permit to enter. Markets run along the outer wall: black glass in every grade from raw fragments to polished display pieces to the rare singing slabs that react to water or magic. Provenance is aggressively documented by sellers, accurately in most cases, and in the remaining cases documented in a way that answers every question likely to be asked. The Vaults maintain a buying office at the north end of the Rim for acquisitions that meet certain criteria. The criteria are not published.
Three listening posts operate on the Rim, each staffed by a rotating warden whose job is to log anomalous content from the Whisper Winds as it passes the rim elevation. The wardens are not Arcanetier staff and do not have Vault clearance. Their logs are collected weekly by a ward-wright on a route that also includes the eastern crater wall station. The ward-wright is not cleared to read the logs. She delivers them sealed. Nobody has explained to her why she is doing this and she has not asked, which the Vaults consider ideal.
The Scriptorium appears on the Rim two or three times a year: a mobile archive operating out of a converted barge-wagon that sells reproductions of pre-Accord documents, annotated maps, and research that has lapsed out of Vault exclusivity. Its operators are licensed by the Concord Archive under a travelling-commerce provision that has not been formally reviewed since the provision was written. The Archive is aware that the Scriptorium sometimes sells materials that push the edges of this provision. The Archive has not yet decided what to do about this.
After the market stalls close, the Rim belongs to researchers who find it easier to think at altitude, students who cannot afford Collegia accommodation, and the occasional licensed observer watching the crater for Whisper Wind activity. The black glass sometimes glows without apparent cause, particularly on the Sundershock Anniversary and, more unpredictably, on nights when the Archive logs something it does not immediately classify. Residents of the Rim have learned to treat the glow as ambient lighting and not to ask which category tonight falls into.
“The glass glows when it remembers something. We have not determined whether it is remembering the Sundershock or something that happened before it. Both possibilities are being studied under the appropriate permits.”Arcanetier Vaults, public information board, eastern Rim